DeMONT: Share the journey, taboos and all

Author Jim Lotz gets to work on his electric typewriter. Lotz, 85, has penned 30 books and countless letters to the editor throughout his life as an educator and activist. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

“So you’re here to talk about the ‘taboo,’” says Jim Lotz, using the first two fingers on both hands to make quotation marks in the air.

The taboo in question is death, in this case his.

After cancer was detected in his pancreas last May, the doctors told Lotz that he’d be gone within nine months.

Yet, fresh from a workout at Saint Mary’s University, there he sits on a chair in Thorndean, a nearby house built in 1835, smiling and for now symptom free, his mind as engaged as ever, his spirit as buoyant as it’s always been.

Lotz cheerfully informs me that he has decided to forgo treatment for his cancer.

“It would,” he says, “just clutter up my ability to live what life I have left.”

Instead, and while he still can, this writer of 30 books and countless letters to the editor, this educator and activist, this lover of his adopted home of Nova Scotia and his late wife Pat — this man who seems to have crammed several eventful lives into 85-years — has invited me over so that he can pass on what he knows about dying “without being a nuisance to others.”

As selfless as the act seems, it’s entirely in keeping with the philosophy of a “sort of agnostic” who is as likely to quote Taoist or Buddhist thought as he is the Bible.

“Life is God’s gift,” Lotz says. “We have a responsibility to pass on what we’ve learned to others.”

Some of what he’s learned will be found in Sharing the Journey, his autobiography being published in January by Pottersfield Press.

Recounting the highlights of a life that reads like something from the Boys Own adventure papers of his British youth would eat up all of this space and then some.

So I’m just going to say that Lotz grew up looking wistfully out to sea at the mouth of the Mersey River during the Liverpool (U.K.) blitz, received the Queen’s Medal for saving someone from an angry mob in Nigeria, and was part of an expedition to the ice shelf in northern Ellesmere Island.

All of this happened long before Lotz and his wife Pat moved to Halifax 41 years ago.

Everything he’s experienced — the uncertainty about whether a Luftwaffe bomb was going to fall on his house, to somehow surviving a trio of car crashes and the African riots — has imbued Lotz with a sense of the “arbitrariness of life.”

“Que sera, bloody-well sera,” is how he sums up his attitude to life’s vicissitudes.

There’s no bitterness in his voice when he tells me about having been “broke, fired and unemployed” during his working days, which have really never ended.

About losing a daughter when she was just 41.

Or even about the death of Pat in 2012, who trained as a librarian but is best known to the rest of us as a writer and editor.

(When I ask Lotz what he will miss when he goes, he replies, “I will miss what I’m already missing. I will miss Pat.”)

Life, he says, is spiral rather than linear. Death, in other word, “is not inseparable from life.”

When I ask him what has surprised him about his time on the Earth, Lotz, who has received an honorary degree from Saint Mary’s as well as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, says, “Everything. The beauty, the brutality, the absurdities of life.”

He doesn’t wallow in regret (“Every mistake is a rebirth,” he says at one point in our conversation, quoting somebody.) Nor does he rage against what another writer from the British Isles called “the dying of the light.”

Instead, he calls life “a continual opening” right up until the end.

Recently, he took up yoga. Last year Lotz returned to England to see family there for perhaps the last time.

Having lived life pretty much on his own terms, he’s not the type with a “bucket list” of experiences that he’s trying to cram into the time left.

Instead, he’s more worried about what he can pass on.

Which brings us to the question of dying with, in his words, “a minimum of fuss and bother.”

Make sure the practical stuff is all looked after, he tells me: get a will and a power of attorney. Ensure a medical consent form has been signed, since that allows a caretaker to specify what kinds of medical interventions are allowable.

If you are anything like him, for God’s sakes get a do-not-resuscitate order.

Then, once that stuff is all straightened away, lighten up. “Don’t be defined by what is wrong with you,” he says.

Lotz, therefore, goes to the gym. He sees his broad network of friends — “what we all need is fellowship” — which includes a nephew living nearby.

He reads, listens and forms opinions. (He says the Heritage Trust, an organization that he and Pat both staunchly supported, “has stepped outside of its remit” in its recent, high-profile dispute with developer Joe Ramia.)

In a gentle way he tries to find homes for his possessions, including his books, one of which he insists I take away with me.

If Lotz feels strongly about something, he slides a piece of paper into the Nakajima typewriter that sits on his work desk, alongside an old picture of Liverpool, and bangs out a letter to the editor.

The hour may be late, but as Lotz points out: Que sera, bloody-well sera. So, just live.